The Weekly Standard

Every schoolboy ought to know—but probably doesn’t—the famous couplet from Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy”: “Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep / Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.” George Orwell, though he held that Kipling did not “understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp,” nevertheless endorsed Kipling’s sentiment. He sneered at those “left-wing parties in the highly industrialised countries” who “make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. . . . [Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilised while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.”

Perhaps every schoolboy does know the “wolf, sheep, and sheepdogs” speech from 2014’s American Sniper or at least its memorably obscene cognate, a decade earlier, in Team America: World Police. We are divided into the strong and the weak. The strong are subdivided into predators and protectors. The training of men with violent and thrill-seeking natures into “sheepdogs” is a necessary condition of our fragile order. Ben Blum’s Ranger Games takes up this essential fact and asks: How honest are we willing to be about those “inevitably less civilized” men on whom the enterprise of civilization will, like it or not, inevitably depend?

This question was thrust upon Blum in an unlikely, even cinematic, fashion. In 2006, his cousin Alex Blum, then on the cusp of realizing his dream of serving with the elite Army Rangers, participated in an audacious armed bank robbery in Tacoma, Washington. Then again, to call it “audacious” may be to reach for an ennobling cliché. What it really was was senseless and poorly executed. Though planned in some particulars as meticulously as the bin Laden raid, it failed on what can hardly be counted as a detail: Nobody bothered to obscure the license plate on the silver Audi that Alex, the getaway driver, had borrowed from his dad.

Ranger Games explores the discomfiting realities, and occasionally enormities, that the ennobling clichés conceal. The all-American Blum family, with its back-slapping jocks and starry-eyed patriots, was just such a cliché: perfect on the surface but ill-equipped to cultivate one of its most promising members, the socially awkward yet talented mathematician Ben Blum. “He had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man”: That is Orwell on Kipling again, but it applies equally well to Ben Blum, who could have cocooned himself in intellection but chose to wonder how a certain kind of reckless, adrenaline-drunk masculinity really works.

First Ben had to wonder something simpler: Why would Alex do it? Why would he dynamite his future with the Rangers to commit a crime that, even were it not utterly counter to his family and military values, he was almost certain not to get away with?

Several sensational theories are advanced over the book’s 400-plus pages, all turning on the fact that the robbery was masterminded—if that is the right word—by Alex’s most trusted and admired military superior, Luke Elliott Sommer. One is that Alex was so brainwashed by the Rangers’ sadistically grueling selection process—ominously called RIP, for Ranger Indoctrination Program—that he was incapable of making his own decisions. (RIP has since been renamed, less ominously, RASP, or Ranger Assessment and Selection Program.) Another theory is that Alex believed the robbery to be staged, a training simulation to prepare him for unusual behind-enemy-lines combat scenarios. Still another is that Sommer was an alpha-male Svengali who manipulated his co-conspirators as easily as he might field strip an M4 carbine.

The first of these theories is the most substantial. Ben Blum depicts Ranger training as akin to something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It is not only physically taxing, as one might expect, but also emotionally disorienting and debilitating. The practice of “smoking” recruits—doling out imaginative impromptu punishments—is often preceded by ordering them to break a rule in order to have something to punish. In this lose-lose environment, almost comically savage verbal abuse comes standard. The average civilian will recognize it only from, say, Full Metal Jacket or some of David Mamet’s scripts.

But Ben Blum hints at an uncomfortable possibility: What if this process is both dangerous to a soldier’s identity or sanity and entirely necessary? He describes in considerable detail the thought and research that have gone into developing our military’s training regimens. His digressions on works like S. L. A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire (1947) and Samuel A. Stouffer’s The American Soldier (1949) are illuminating. The reader is left to contend with his own relative ignorance, his “unknown unknowns,” and to ask: What if this is the least worst way to train fighting men, with tragedies like Alex Blum’s the unavoidable collateral damage? A modern military, like any highly specialized, technical organization, does things for a reason. As a character in Zero Dark Thirty says, moments before being vaporized, “Procedures only work if we follow them every time.”

To say the first theory is the most substantial is not, however, to say that it is altogether very substantial. Even an automaton must recognize an order as such before obeying it. At nowhere in its haphazard planning stages does the robbery carry even a whiff of official sanction. By that same token, the argument—inconsistently and tentatively offered by Alex Blum himself—that because training may involve realistic simulations, anything that happens at any time might be training, is a child’s logic, not a soldier’s. This leaves us with Luke Elliott Sommer as mind-control artist.

It is easy to see why these theories might appeal to Alex’s family or his defense attorney, to critics of military culture, or to some devotees of psychology and social science. It is hard to see, however, why anyone familiar with Occam’s razor should have much patience for them. The reader feels like a teacher told by the parents of his worst-behaved student that he is a “good kid,” as if goodness were some discrete thing, existing independent of one’s actions, like an organ, like a heart. Alex never broke a rule in his life, we are reassured. And yet the end to which Alex had put all of this discipline was not, you may recall, getting a job as a crossing guard. This fact seems relevant.

And so these theories, though irresistible fodder for a true-crime book, are only necessary if one accepts a set of naïve and sentimental premises. No, parents do not and cannot know their children completely. No, what someone does to get what he wants—in this case, to serve in a larger-than-life military unit—is not a reliable indicator of his character. No, Luke Elliott Sommer, profiled in painstaking and fascinating detail by Ben Blum, does not seem like a sophisticated and charismatic Hannibal Lecter type. He seems, to adapt a phrase, like a stupid person’s idea of an evil genius, or maybe just an evil genius as imagined by a young man raised on bad movies and worse video games. His plans—inciting turf wars with the Hells Angels; starting a crime family—sound like the overheated fantasies of an overgrown teenager.

So it is not much of a surprise, really, when Ben Blum finally learns that his cousin has been lying to everyone, perhaps including himself. It is a relief to watch him learn it—the hard way, after he has expended immeasurable time and effort trying to crack what turns out to be a simple case. Our armies rely for their power on youth, a measure of recklessness, a capacity for fantasy, an appetite for glory. This is a feature, not a bug. We have armies in part so that those elemental forces are channeled toward the common weal. Ranger Games is a moving look at one family’s struggles with truth and forgiveness. Yet it is a hell of a lot more compelling as a reminder of what the world might look like if young men like Alex Blum had no coherent ideals to serve at all.